First Android Bay Trail tablets to arrive in Q2

Intel has confirmed that the first Android tablets featuring its quad-core Atom processor will begin arriving in the second quarter.

Brian Krzanich, Intel’s chief executive told investors on Thursday that its recent focus on attracting Android tablet makers was about to pay off.

“Most of the Bay Trail Android tablets really start showing up more in Q2…remember we made a shift, the original program for Bay Trail was all Windows,” he said during its fourth-quarter earnings call.

Krzanich said the delay in Bay Trail-based Android tablets was down to the company’s shift in strategy halfway through the chipset’s development.

There were no Android Bay Trail tablets on show at CES – a point several commentators and investors picked up on.

64-bit headstart

One of Krzanich’s main points during the conversation was that although Bay Trail-based Android tablets were absent at the event, it would still be one of the first chips to support 64-bit Android to hit the market.

“[Device makers] who build with our products now can already go out and start to utilise 64-bit,” he told the call [transcript courtesy of Seeking Alpha].

"We are out there working with the OSs, all of the OSs and the OEMs to go enable that. The real usages…are going to be in those high compute areas, things like video, things like media, transfer media manipulation.

“All the classic things around computing that you saw drive the compute cycles on PC and people are doing more and more with tablets and phones or that will be the same things that drive 64-bit utilisation on these mobile devices,” he added."

Currently only Apple has tablets running on 64-bit operating systems. The main benefit of 64-bit over 32-bit processors is the ability to build devices with more than 4GB of RAM.